Open And Closed System-Nurse To Patient Ratio Due To Nurse Shortage

Open and Closed System-Nurse to Patient Ratio Due to Nurse Shortage Author’s Name Institutional Affiliation Problem Description The landscape of healthcare has been changing with the introduction of different technologies and an increase in demand for quality healthcare. In such a scenario of minimizing workforce, the profession of nursing has also been affected by it, and the shortage of nurses has become a serious problem which is inflicting harm to the quality of healthcare. The nurse to patient ratio severely affects the outcome of specialized units which need extensive attention from nurses. The shortage of nurses results in increased workload over nurses which eventually results in decreased quality healthcare. To assess the impact of a nurse to patient ratio over the outcome of the patient, a meta-analysis was done (Driscoll et al., 2017) in which 175,755 patients from six different studies that were admitted into ICU/CCU units. The higher number of nursing staff have decreased the mortality rate by 14%, directly affecting the outcome of the patient. The scenario where there is a shortage of nursing staff results in decreased survival of critically ill patients. The analysis was done over 894 patients who were admitted in critical care units (Lee et al., 2017). It was observed that the patient’s survival rate was 95% when patients were exposed with a nurse to the patient ration of fewer than 40 means normal workload. The patient survival rate decreased when they were exposed to the higher patient to nurse ration like greater than 52. This observation deduces that exposing critically ill patients to staff suffering from the high workload decreases their chances of survival. Open-system Perspective Every healthcare setup follows their system which is feasible for them. Therefore two types of a healthcare system are being adopted generally, open system and closed system. The closed system is isolated from the outside input, therefore, restricting the growth whereas open system receives all the input from the external environment. The open system involves energy transformation, integration, negative feedback, coordination and differentiation. Closed-system Per...